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Evangelical leaders and conservative activists have a simple message for establishment Republicans about Mitt Romney’s failed presidential bid: We told you so.

After nearly two weeks of listening to GOP officials pledge to assert greater control over the party and its most strident voices in the wake of Romney’s loss, grass-roots activists have begun to fight back, saying that they are not to blame for the party’s losses in November.

“The moderates have had their candidate in 2008 and they had their candidate in 2012. And they got crushed in both elections. Now they tell us we have to keep moderating. >>>

Ted Cruz, a tea party favorite, trounced Texas’s establishment candidate in a primary on his way to becoming the second Hispanic Republican in the Senate, and the battle he waged in the Lone Star State epitomizes the fight between the two sides. Although he is considered a rising star with a personal biography that GOP leaders wish to promote, Cruz falls squarely in the camp that thinks Romney was not conservative enough and did not fully articulate a conservative contrast to President Obama, except during the first presidential debate.

“It was the one time we actually contested ideas, presented two viewpoints and directions for the country,” he said at the Federalist Society’s annual dinner in Washington. “And then, inevitably, there are these mandarins of politics, who give the voice: ‘Don’t show any contrasts. Don’t rock the boat.’ So by the third debate, I’m pretty certain Mitt Romney actually French-kissed Barack Obama.”

The 2014 Senate races will serve as a test for establishment control of the political process. >>>

Some outside groups, however, stand ready to fight for the most conservative nominee, pointing to Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) as examples of rising stars who won Senate races without establishment support.

“The party is rarely in a position to determine the best candidate,” said Chris Chocola, president of the Club for Growth. “When you have someone who can articulate a clear, convincing, conservative message, they win.”

They could add Bob Dole as well as GHW Bush and GW Bush to the list. Dubya was the most socially conservative of the last four we ran and the only one to get elected. And he was re-elected with more votes than BHO got.

For us, this is a Valley Forge moment. This is a time for leadership that calls on us to re-enlist in the struggle to preserve freedom, and a leadership that drills us in the principles that made us great.

To get back on track I would suggest we focus on a few simple points: truth, oversight, action and accountability.One of the lessons from last Tuesday is that we’ve failed to tell the American people – particularly young voters – the truth about where we are.The truth is, on our present course, the average young person in this country is going to inherit a lower standard of living than their parents. That is unacceptable.

America is already bankrupt. We may not believe it. We may not yet feel its full effects. But we are effectively bankrupt. Our debt, which is 103 percent of our GDP, now exceeds the size of our entire economy.The crisis is imminent. Today, we’re on the cusp of another downgrade. If interest rates go up one point, we add at least another $113 billion to our deficit every year. If rates return to historic averages, we’ll add about $640 billion to our deficit every year – which is more than our defense budget.

In two years, the Social Security disability trust fund goes bankrupt. In five years, Medicare Part A – the hospital insurance trust fund – may be bankrupt. And in ten years the costs of entitlements and interest on the debt alone will consume all available tax revenues. That means our entire military and discretionary budget will be financed entirely on borrowed – or printed – money.

The truth is we’ll never get to the point of running DOD on money borrowed from China and elsewhere. Eventually, the rest of the world will decide we can’t pay what we owe and they’ll stop lending us money. As I describe in my book, The Debt Bomb, that’s when the party is over.That isn’t just my opinion. In 2011 Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke told Congress that these unsustainable spending levels can’t continue “because creditors would never be willing to lend to a government whose debt, relative to national income, is rising without limit.”Here’s why this is important in the context of what happened last Tuesday.

We’ve heard a lot of talk about the left’s so-called demographic advantage and the president’s electoral firewall, and whether that firewall will hold in future elections. Let me tell you some good news. Those of us who believe in the Constitution and limited government have a much more potent firewall working in our favor: it is a mathematical and budgetary firewall. It is a firewall that tells us – in very stark terms – that we can’t afford the status quo. We don’t have the money. Sooner rather than later, the other side will have to accept reforms that are a lot closer to our principles than theirs.

The demographic advantage – at least among younger voters – is a bubble of inflated expectations that can’t be met. Where the left sees a demographic advantage I see a generation of Americans about to be drowned in debt. When that happens, our solutions will be like an ark in the storm.

Hopefully we won’t have to live through such a crisis. If we tell the truth effectively we may not have to.So, our first task is to tell the truth. The second is oversight, which has to happen before you set priorities and get spending under control.Oversight isn’t very popular in Washington because politicians on both sides prefer to create new programs instead of looking at whether the programs we’ve already created are working. But, I believe, oversight resonates with families because that’s how they live their lives every day. In the real world, people look their budgets and make choices. In Washington, we make excuses, and defer choices to future generations.Oversight is about methodically and relentlessly building the case for limited government. And it’s about recognizing that big changes often happen in small steps. That’s why I release reports on all areas of the government. In my latest annual Wastebook report we found federal funding from everything from robotic squirrels to climate change musicals to caviar promotion.

Here are a few more. You can’t make this stuff up. We found:

• $27 million for Moroccan pottery classes• $505,000 for the promotion of specialty shampoo and other beauty products for cats and dogs• $1.3 million in corporate welfare for the world’s largest snack food producer, PepsiCo Inc.• $350,000 for a government-funded study on how golfers might benefit from using their imagination to envision the hole to be bigger than it actually is. Really? Maybe we should have studied how to help politicians imagine a smaller hole in the budget.

The list goes on and on. And I’m adding to the list tomorrow when I’ll release a report that details more than $60 billion in non-defense spending at the Pentagon.

The point of these reports is to help the public have an understanding of government that reflects reality. And the reality is we could reduce the size of government by one-third today and no one outside of Washington would be able to tell the difference.Oversight, again, isn’t just the responsibility of those of us in elected office. It’s the media’s responsibility as well. Many of you in this room are doing that and I salute you.

So, task number two is oversight. The last two – action and accountability – go together.Perhaps the greatest problem I’ve seen in the Republican Party since being elected in the Class of 1994 is the gap between our words and actions. We have two forms of conservatism in Washington. One is cheap or complacent conservatism; the other is costly or courageous conservatism. One is common, the other is rare.

Cheap or complacent conservatism is the conservatism of rhetoric, pledges and pandering. Costly and courageous conservatism is a conservatism of action, solutions and sacrifice. Cheap conservatism looks for scapegoats to compensate for its failure to communicate and implement a limited government agenda. Costly conservatism is brimming with optimism and compelling solutions. Cheap conservatism treats particular areas of the budget as sacred based on political expediency. Costly conservatism treats every tax dollar as sacred based on the principles of liberty and self-government.

Whether we have cheap or costly conservatism really is up to all of us in this room, particularly those of you who are leaders in the media and interest groups. My challenge to you is don’t elevate the politicians who tell you what you want to hear; elevate the leaders who are willing to take us where we need to go.

Let me make a final point about accountability. Many want to blame our setbacks in the Senate, in particular, on the Tea Party. I agree we need to do a much, much better job of candidate recruitment. But the problem in Republican politics isn’t the challengers: it’s the incumbents: it’s the career politicians who say they are for limited government and lower taxes but make decisions that give us bigger government and higher taxes.
Voters will forgive us for trying and failing, but they won’t – nor should they – forgive us for not trying. If we align our actions with our words and primary ourselves with term limits we’ll create the kind of leadership America needs.

I agree in general with Sen. Coburn's remarks but I have yet to hear a valid argument to the Federal govt's constitutional authority to set term limits to state elected officials.

The 21st century. The age of Smart phones and Stupid people.

It is said that branches draw their life from the vine. Each is separate yet all are one as they share one life giving stem . The Bible tells us we are called to a similar union in life, our lives with the life of God. We are incorporated into him; made sharers in his life. Apart from this union we can do nothing.